XVI

Palatability for the Corpse in My Poetry

I swear limerence is my default setting. I want. I want. I want. I want. Always to the side. I never know. You know? I hope so. I imagine. You in a crewneck. You rolling the sleeves of your button up. You in blue jeans. Or black jeans. Brushing the hair off my cheek. The colour of your car (I hope you have a car). Our kitchen.

All I write about it ache. Everything is the same. Every page I write is dripping with twenty-three years of lonely blood. I want to write about feathers and grace and kindness but all that comes out is mangled desire. Who comes to poetry for a corpse?

This feels like a distinct lack of gratitude. Criminal obsession with a singular fault. How long have I been lonely for? I swear I never was but in company it spills out of me till I’m alone in my car gaping. There are gaps under my skin I never found. There is really only one topic I am drawn to write about. Everything else comes out wrong And this comes out ugly.

I have been thinking a lot about palatability. I want to be easy to swallow. Consumed in under a minute, a pleasant addition to your break. I don’t know how to make myself easier to digest and this isn’t helping. somehow I think this is worse.

I need pretty poems, backgrounds and carousels. Four lines of relatable. One of sting. Something that touches people the way they consent to. I want quiet poems. I don’t want to bleed.

For almost a year now I have been writing one poem. Every piece is the same, same words, same topic same line breaks. I enrolled at uni to be pushed but I can never do what I’m told. I argue with everything, fighting for my shitty angst. All I have is this angst, without it I don’t write, the same six words I have loved since 2016.

God I hope I can write something new. Sweet and light and careful.

Dorothea Blythe